With millions of ships at sea at any given time, accidents are inevitable. And occasionally, an ocean voyage turns terribly tragic. Death tolls can be hard to confirm given stowaways and overloaded ships, and some of the deadliest disasters have occurred on riverboats, not on the open ocean. Here, if you are interested in disasters on the sea, you should check out the article of Insidermonkey on the deadliest shipwrecks in history.

There is a romantic element to the disaster of a shipwreck that is associated with no other form of transport. It may be that the ethos of ‘women and children first’ – established by the brave men of the HMS Birkenhead in 1845 – who, realizing that there were too few lifeboats for everybody, sacrificed themselves to save the most vulnerable. 460 heroes died that day, but this was a small number in maritime history. What’s more, while RMS Titanic may be the most notorious shipwreck on record, it is by no means the worst. The name Titanic became synonymous with disaster after the ocean liner sank on its maiden voyage in 1912, causing more than 1,500 people to die. However, that tragedy is far from the world’s worst maritime disaster, in terms of loss of life. History’s deadliest shipwreck occurred in 1945, when some 9,000 people perished after a German vessel, the Wilhelm Gustloff, was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine in the Baltic Sea. Find out more about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, and 9 other other major shipwrecks you might not know about.